Am I naive in thinking you can write clever code so long as your commenting for it increases exponentially with respect to "unit" increases in cleverness?

Yes; comments are far too often a maintenance burden.

I want the intent of my code to be clear on reading the code itself. Where it's not, I try to rephrase the code for clarity. Where that's not possible, I use a comment to explain the motivation.

Agreed. Comments should explain the why. The what should be blindingly obvious from the code.

---
$world=~s/war/peace/g

I have a recent personal experience of this.

Half a year ago, I did some intricate mangling of a query language. The delivery schedule was really, really tight.

People reading my code, complained that all the comments made it hard to read. That was a first. :-)

With less time pressure I would generally refactor code this complex, so it wouldn't need all the explanations. (Not so "clever" -- more "dense". Just an OO interface to the code's internal data structures would have helped a lot with clarity.)

The code more or less followed Perl Best Practices, but was still an example on how not to do it... :-(

Edit: Refactored this comment a bit, so it is possible to parse. :-)